Star Trek: Enterprise's production design team received the instruction to design a small Nausicaan attack fighter during the show's first season. Even though Nausicaan starships had never before been portrayed, inspiration for the forthcoming design was taken from how Nausicaans themselves had been established as typically behaving; due to their thuggish nature as belligerent troublemakers, their vessels had to have a fittingly threatening and aggressive appearance.

Illustrator John Eaves began designing the Nausicaan vessel by sketching out a variety of basic shapes. "I just threw a whole bunch of stuff together," he stated. These initial sketches included a design concept for a Vulcan ship, which Eaves had drawn earlier. The same ship layout, with blade-like curves, gave Eaves a design direction, which he expanded upon in the other sketches. As he became increasingly more inspired, Eaves felt the look he was aiming for was somewhere "between the bottom of a shovel and a manta ray." The producers approved one of the initial illustrations as the final version, a configuration Eaves likened to a manta ray. "On this one, they chose a ship right off the first pass [....] It was a busy show, so I didn't get to flesh it out a little bit more, but I didn't need to."

The reason it wasn't essential for John Eaves to plan all the details of the Nausicaan craft was that the CGI artists knew how to proceed from his rudimentary design, anyway. At Eden FX, Lead CG Artist Pierre Drolet took Eaves' illustration and digitally turned it into a three-dimensional model. Drolet incorporated some of his own ideas into the design, shading the Nausicaan ship with an earthy color scheme, and added detailing such as the forward plasma cannons. All these finishing touches helped give the ship its highly sought-after aggressive look. (Star Trek: The Official Starships Collection, issue 30, pp. 16-17)

These vessels could presumably travel faster than warp 1.8, the maximum speed of the Fortunate, for them to be able to constantly locate, track, attack, and raid said vessel over an extended period of time. Issue 30 of Star Trek: The Official Starships Collection lists the Nausicaan fighters as having a maximum speed of warp 2 and a length of 90 meters.